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Organic SEO no longer valuable
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Who said?? Organic seo is AEO Geo everything. The thing matters is entity base seo, Credibility, mentions and Authority.
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Yes organic listings are shown lower. But most brands aren’t considering the full search experience. Google’s net traffic is actually down compared to chat and bing because of the way they’ve changed the search experience. Users hate the AI overviews. They hate sponsored listings. Follow the potential customer.
It’s not easy but service businesses can now also build their own version of Google and Google Ads. I think this is what we’re moving towards. You’ll search for plumbers on plumbing search. An era of divided ecosystems like the streaming platform’s.
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You’re talking about local SEO here, where your GBP and map ranking is most of the battle. Someone searching for high-intent “service in city” is very likely not scrolling down to click on organic search results. They’re choosing the top 3 that appear in the map, maybe scanning the AI Overview if one appears.
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Changing. Still valuable. One of my properties is generating organic leads from Bing, AI, DDG, etc … Google is definitely making changes. We’ve got things to learn for sure.
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As someone in a parallel industry, demand is just down YoY. In some markets up to 50%. Biggest priorities have been ensuring we are bidding on searched we’d win regardless as well as improving landing pages to convert on the traffic we do get.
But yeah hoping for some weather to push demand in the coming months
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We don’t have a single client that’s down YoY. Search volume is still increasing, you’re just not ranking for rhe right keywords or you need to optimize better to encourage the clicks. What bright traffic 5 years ago is a poor strategy if you haven’t evolved.
Home services specifically shouldn’t be down that much, especially if you’re doing PPC and have strong organic presence. Yiu shouldn’t be losing traffic to AI summaries, which is what’s killing bloggers and informational sites.
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Your diagnosis is right. Local service queries are exactly where Google has restructured the results page most aggressively – AI Overview, then ads, then maps pack, then more ads, then organic. For a lot of searches organic position 1 is now effectively position 6 or 7 on the page. A few things worth considering for your specific situation. Local intent queries are actually more protected than informational ones. “Service in city” with clear transactional intent still drives clicks because users need to book, not just get an answer. The drop you’re seeing is real but it may not get as bad as pure informational queries. Your maps presence becomes more important than ever in this environment. The maps pack is sitting above organic and below the first ad block, that’s premium real estate now. If you haven’t maxed out your Google Business Profile with services, photos, reviews and Q&A content that’s the highest leverage move right now. On the AI visibility ads you’re seeing – the honest answer is it depends entirely on how your customers are searching. For local service businesses with high transactional intent, customers are still using Google Maps and search more than AI platforms for “find me a plumber near me” type queries. AI search matters more as they move up the funnel to research and comparison. Your CAC being good on paid is actually the signal, lean into what’s working while protecting your maps presence.
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Are you still in the same positions for those searches that you were in a year ago?
Is search volume for that service the same as it was a year ago?
Some of your customers (maybe more than you think) will be finding your service (whether it’s your business or a competitor) via ChatGPT etc, so your share of voice there is worth investigating, but AI Overview won’t be appearing for “service in location” searches, so at least AI won’t be impacting you in that way.
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Organic SEO is still valuable, but Ive changed my approach. We try to target AI overviews on Google for some of our specialty services. Since these services are not covered as much I think its easier to see results. Also creating these pages helped improve keywords for our google business profile.
I look at AI overviews on Google as the most important target now for real customers. A lot of companies will create tons of pages that rank organically for keywords but those pages tend to bring informational traffic and they’re not converting into leads.
Example… I have a client in environmental testing. I have a few posts about Asbestos that rank nationally and bring in a huge amount of clicks. However, 99.9% of those clicks are not going to contact us because they’re informational users. So we have great looking impression and click numbers that are really worth nothing.
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Just stop gaming the system. It was always simple, provide good shit, read the google seo guidelines and adhere to it. Let google do the rest, stop trying to hack the blackbox. It works for a short while until the next update. If your info or service is shite then it is shite and google would rank it where it needs to be.
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Everyone is weighing in, but no one knows enough to really help you evaluate your questions.
What type of service is this? Sounds like a local service, but is it? Physical or digital service?
Of all your leads from the past couple years, what % came from organic? How many of those converted?
Is your analytics system tracking AI traffic and conversions yet or are you tracking your default channels which don’t account for those.
That’s your baseline.
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I work with several hundred+ million dollar brands. What you’re experiencing is pretty common. The crowding of search results with extra stuff is impacting everyone. The only ones I see growing are the ones that were at a lower starting point, and/or are increasing the scale of products/services offered or locations served.
I’d suggest recalibrating expectations. You’re already positioned really well organically from what it sounds like. If there are opportunities for you to appear in some of these additional search results features (e.g., you aren’t on the free Merchant Center listings), you can make up some real ground/visibility there.
Otherwise, yea. Google is prioritizing a bunch of other stuff beyond the 10 blue links now.
My advice? Focus on building relationships with partners that have audiences that naturally flow into what you’re doing and get some backlinks going. Work on YouTube and the socials (and their optimization) if they aren’t crisp and well stocked. Make sure the content teams are aligning the copy on your product pages to your customer’s needs first and always. To that end, make sure you’re acutely aware of what their feedback is saying and adjust accordingly (FAQs derived from their reviews are the best kind). Track the traffic you’re getting from “AI” in GA4 or similar source of truth. You should be able to filter by ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot and others. Have those as separate sections in your Looker Studio reporting or similar. It’s probably next to nothing, but worth keeping an eye on. I wouldn’t recommend spending any time or money exclusively LLM optimization. Just do really good SEO and you’ll be present in LLM systems too. And again, make sure your brand is present in all of the SERP features that your brand should appear in and address gaps where your team identifies them. Oh, and probably invest in a good CRO program to squeeze more performance out of the traffic you’re getting from organic (and all of your channels, for that matter). Oh, and look for opportunities where your keywords are positioning your brand high that you may be able to draw down some of the paid spend to allow the organic channel to drive that traffic instead of over-relying on PPC. My teams have had success with a combination of those, depending on the client and their individual need.
Best of luck.
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i feel like now is the time google could be disrupted with a pure search engine devoid of AI trash
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I’d be a little careful blaming AI first here, especially if these are mostly “service + city” searches.
For local service businesses, I think the bigger issue is that ranking organically doesn’t mean the same thing it used to. You might still be in a good organic position, but the user has already seen ads, the map pack, reviews, maybe an AI result, and a bunch of other noise before they ever get to the blue links.
The first thing I’d do is split the problem in GSC.
If impressions are down, that’s probably demand, rankings, or search volume.
If impressions are stable but CTR is down, that’s probably SERP crowding.
If clicks are stable but bookings are down, that’s more likely CRO, pricing, offer, seasonality, or tracking.
For a service business I’d probably care more about the map pack than traditional organic at this point. GBP categories, reviews, photos, service areas, local links/citations, and strong service/location pages are all worth looking at.
If your CAC is still good on paid, I’d scale that carefully, but keep brand, non-brand, service/city, competitor and remarketing campaigns separate so you know what’s actually incremental.
I’d be pretty skeptical of anyone selling “ranking in AI results” as a clean product. Track ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot referrals if you want, but I wouldn’t move serious budget there unless you can see customers actually using those journeys.
So I don’t think organic SEO is dead. I think the job has changed from “rank #1” to “own more of the local SERP.”
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